>> i am not sure that there are any major policy changes that i would like to see, because i am not convinced that any major policy changes would have a dramatic effect on the credibility of the threat to fire incumbents. ..

>> stephen greenblatt, what did you write about shakespeare that others haven't? >> i tried to bring shakespeare back into the world, in the world he lived in and in our world. i tried to take the traces that he left, little chicken scratchings really and make a human being out of it. >> what's your reaction when you read about professors saying didn't even exist? >> i don't think too many professors say this, but i think people have this idea -- >> or he didn't write these? >> people have a lot of strange ideas about a lot of things, brian. in the case of shakespeare, he left a lot of records. he was famous in his own time as a playwright and it would require conspiracy theories quite of an extraordinary magnitude to cover his tracks. >> are you comfortable that he wrote everything -- how many plays? >> yeah, 38. lots of poems. did he write absolutely everything by himself alone, no,

absolutely not. he collaborated on a bunch of the plays. he worked in the medium in which collaboration was quite widespread like television writing or movie writing. but what's very striking is that the work that has been done in the last few year, very serious computer work and other work trying to establish exactly the parameters of how much he work and how much collaborators wrote seems to confirm, more conservatively than i would have imagined the least interesting plays or the most problematic of play, the ones that aren't as good are ones he tended to collaborate on. the ones that are exceedingly creaky for one reasons or the other. they have interesting themes in them, but not fully achieved, those are the things that were collaborative performances. the ones that he wrote by himself seems to be likely the ones he wrote by himself. >> when did he live? >> he was born in 1654 in

stratford on avon in england and died in 1616. >> which made him what, 52? >> yeah. >> what does it made stratford upon avon? >> it was a town that is located on the avon rif, so it's upon the avon. there was a fancy bridge in shakes peer's time. the same bridge now. >> what is there now of shakespeare? >> well, since the 18th century the town has been a tourist site. so there's a lot of shakespeare there, or at least a lot of things claim to be shakespeare and quite a few things that are from the time that he lived. the house that he lived in, that he was born in. his birth place is there, the school room that he was in. guilt hall where he might have seen his first play is there. lots of things because actually it became so valuable to the town to keep anything associated with shakespeare that things are

very well preserved in stratford. a lovely place. >> one of if reasons we wanted you to come here is because over the years of "booknotes," some 15 1/2 years, we checked some 50 different authors mentioned, william shakespeare. i want to show you a couple so we get the flavor of what they're saying about and after. >> what i tried to do with humor and columns is let the readers see politics almost like a shakespearean drama in the sense that you have running characters. >> we want to understand life, there's no better way than reading shakespeare and discussing it with a lot of people. >> one of the characteristics of extraordinary people, particularly mozart, shakespeare keets are used as example, these individuals are said to have negative capabilities. what negative capability means is ratherer this than having a strong personality themselves, they have an incredible ability to pick up the personalities of

individuals around them and be able to capture that in their works. >> the children have to learn english, how do you learn english? read shakespeare. >> i can read to you shakespeare word for word. >> dreams in english, and that language is the language of shakespeare and milton and toni morrison. >> the only figures who had more things written about him than lincoln r jesus, shakespeare and napoleon. >> when he mentioned lincoln, it brings back memories of how he used to read shakespeare when he was very young. did you ever study that part of lincoln? >> i didn't, but it doesn't surprise me because the fashioning of eloquence, first of all n the 19th century was bound up with reading shakespeare and still, no better way of crafting your mastery of the language, i think. of shakespeare. >> why was that?

>> because he was the best. because he had the most astonishing, creative mastery of his medium. of anyone in our language. and he was unrivaled in his own time and unrivaled now. >> what makes him the best? >> he had astonishing natural gifts, that is to say there are things that are difficult to explain other than they must have been genetic action, a fantastic alertness to language and then he found a way of deepening and deepening his experience and understanding until he could create a whole world. he has the most -- at least in the english language the most powerful imagination the most powerful ability to conjure up human beings in complex, convincing circumstances of any writer in in -- in our language. >> what were his parents like? >> simple people, at least in their social background. shakespeare comes from a modest

social family. one of the reasons we don't know as much about him as we'd like is that this is the family that goes under the radar of the usual 16th, 17th century attention. not because they were not significant. the father was the equivalent of the mayor in stratford and had other civic offices, but because they're not aristocratic people, not gentry, and his father made fancy gloves for the trade and also probably a small-time hoosier, bottom sold wool illegally, maybe some other things to get by. there are some -- his mother came from a farming family. actually the mother's parents were the yeoman's farmers, but the father's farmer was the tenant farmer so the father married up by marrying into the family.

sir walter raleigh, these are people of modest means, modest backgrounds. >> how many kids dishis parents have? >> the parents had actually -- now i forget the actual -- partly because the kids died in the usual way rather quickly. six i think. but of those, only shakespeare's sister joan a brother richard a brother edmund, brother gilbert survived, four of them. eight actually if you do the count, i'm sorry. >> and what's the first document you can find in his life that still lives? >> a perfectly good document which is a christening record, so he know he was christened. the birth date, april 23rd birthday is just a convention because he was kristened fly days later and that's the usual -- it's usually a three-day interval. >> he was born into what religion? >> he was bornin -- a very good

question. he was born officially into protestantism. england had decisively become protestant, after rocking back and forth, but with the secession of queen elizabeth. so there wasn't tolerance of re -- religious tolerance in the 16th century. or 17th century, so england was officially property stability. where whether they were protestant -- >> you say his father john was a catholic and maybe a protestant and we're not sure. >> yes, it's a complicated world. though probably not more complicated than our life world, our spiritual world. it's not clear when push comes to shove that people are unequivocally one thing and not another. there are plenty of people who are very, very clear about their religious beliefs, but don't want to walk under ladders, and have all kinds of other things that if you push very hard would

look a little strange in terms of an equivocal, single thing. in any case, i think shakespeare's father, we know that he signed off on the order to destroy some of the old catholic white -- whitewash over the old catholic paintings on the wall of the gilt hall as part of the icon know classal, part of the destruction of religious art. so he's definitely on board as it were as a civic official in the new protestant world order. on the other hand, there are lots of strange signs that seem to indicate that he has ties in the other direction, toward catholicism. often it's said at least recently it has been said more that the father was a secret catholic. and there are interesting signs of this, but as say, i try not to hedge my own bets but hedge the bets of that family by saying that, well, maybe shakespeare the discovered that his father was both protestant and catholic. >> what about his mom?

>> his mother comes from a more unequivocally catholic family. her father's will is manifestly from its formulas a catholic will. his mother's family is related to one of the leading kooth lick families in the area. of park hall, birmingham, so a quite important catholic connection. so the likelihood for the mother is that the mother's roots are more decidedly catholic. >> queen elizabeth i was a reigning queen for how long? >> came to power in 1569. >> a lot of years. >> a lot of years. >> why was it the pope back in those days had really authorized the assassination of her and got away with it? >> well, she wasn't popular among the popes at the time. several of them were, you know, in office during her reign. for good reason. her father, henry viii was an

equal opportunity persecutor, a staunch catholic but at a certain moment decided to seize the wealth of the monasteries, and at least tilt the country in the protestant direction, but managed to continue to persecute protestants. then his son edward was a k450i8d when he came to the throne. was really much more dock trinly protestant in the hands of tutors and guardians who were very -- you know, much more determined catholic. they persecuted the catholics. then when edward died, edward's sister mary came to the throne. and mary tutor was a very committed catholic. so they started burning protestants in the country. those who hadn't been able to escape to the continent. so the country had gone back and

forth. elizabeth had been extremely circumspect. she had a fantastically dangerous childhood because any indication -- she was in the tower much of the time. any indication that she was unequivocally protestant would have been greeted by lots of suspicion and the possibly that she'd be executed. and she was though a very young girl, she was unbelievably adroit at hedging her bets and at hinting that she might be one might be the other, though it was reasonably clear to people that she was protestant. she made it much more clear she was a protestant. so that that extent she was fair game in the political assassination business. because that was all that was holding england clearly in the protestant camp. it wasn't at all clear to the pope and to his side, because

there were many spies in england and the spies were sending reports back to the vatican saying that the english aristocracies was in sympathy with catholicism, but they were keeping their counsel because of the protestant queen. so the pope figured if he got rid of the queen, they could bring the -- could bring england back into the catholic camp. that made it dangerous. >> when did you get interested in all this? >> oh, i got interested in it actually back in college, graduate school, and became interested in sir walter raleigh. and fascinated by that life and fascinated by the whole idea this was -- this was a lot of years ago, 40 years ago, about what lies they lead. particularly if those lives are striking or interesting, what ties things together. so why did sir walter raleigh, a

remarkable fellow, why did he leave poetry behind and history? what accounts for the integration of writing and life in this period? that interest has continued through to the present. >> when did you first read shakespeare? >> first memory i have of reading shakespeare is being assigned as you like it in junior high school and hating it. >> why? >> because i thought, oh, man, i can't deal with it. it seemed impossibly old fashioned and silly. >> what do you say to people who i like the story of shakespeare, but i don't like to read it? >> i say, rent the video, take a look. because the plays are certainly written -- they may have been written to be read, though they were read in the time and things were printed and people bought the books at the time. but principally, they were written to be performed. so i can see that someone wouldn't want to pick up mozart's albrett toe and read

it. but you don't expect them to say i don't like mozart, i don't understand it. you have to know how to read music, but if you listen to mozart, you get -- >> what do you prefer, the plays or the sonnets? >> i'm not someone who feels compelled to make a choice, but i do prefer the plays fundamentally to the sonnet. i find the sonnets remarkable, fascinating, but i find them so richly worked, so fine and complex, such complicated mechanisms that i rarely allow myself the time to play with them enough to open them up, whereas the plays give themselves much more easily to you. >> where did you grow up? >> in newton, massachusetts. >> where did you go to college? >> i went to college at yale, and then in england for a couple of years afterwards. cambridge. then i went back to yale for my grad school.

>> where do you teach now? >> i teach at harvard. >> what you teach? >> i teach english literature. a lot of shakespeare to be sure. but from time to time i teach other things as well, particularly in the field of the renaissance as a whole. i taught courses on memory, courses on the invention or the reimagining of curiosity. curiosity should be thought of as a vice and then at a certain point people see it as a good thing and then lots of other things. >> why has shakespeare lasted so long and everybody -- you hear people say it's the most important writer in the english language. do you agree with that? >> i do. i think few people would disagree with it. why has he lasted so long? because he is infinitely pleasurable and rich. it's not that -- we can say lots of wonderful things about him that sound morally uplifting but it starts with pleasure and interest, not in my view, not

fundamentally like reading something that's making the truth -- like the bible would be an example. but it's about giving you pleasure. deep pleasure, complex, rich pleasure and shakespeare was fantastically good at this, and was very clever in his own time and then aon thishingly turns out to have been good at what looks like an impossible thing of pleasing the most sophisticated, complex, demanding literature of his time and drawing in hundreds, thousands of ordinary people and the theaters depended on bringing 1,500 and 2,000 people on in an afternoon. you couldn't take 10 people and please them. you had to get a huge crowd in there paying a penny standing up to watch a play and you had to do both at the same time. and shakespeare almost uniquely figured out how to do that.

>> how much education did he have? >> more than people think. he didn't go to oxford or to cambridge, and thereby hangs a tail. might have been expected to go to oxford. not that his father or mother did, because they were probably illiterate. i'm sure they would have wanted him to go because it was part of the strategy of social advancement. but he didn't go. on the other hand, there's an xidingly high likelihood that he would have continued all the way through or very close to the end of quite rigorous secondary school education which would have come free to him and we know quite a bit about. it was very, very good and that's true, by the way, not just of shakespeare but of the whole environment in the middle of -- and there are good schools. these are people living in a remote back water in -- where

they have no access to education. this is someone who had by our standards, at least maybe not by the highest renaissance standards, but a rather impressive education, at least in the -- what we call the humanities. >> stratford is how far from london? >> a couple of hard day's ride in his time. >> on a horse. >> on a horse, yeah. it was a long, difficult trip. i mean, it wasn't something you did -- i mean, shakespeare must have done it relatively regularly but not every weekend. >> how many miles is it? >> i want to say 80 or 90 miles, but someone would call me in and correct me if i'm sure. >> what age did he marry? >> he married at 18. which was probably not the best idea he ever had in life. he married a woman who was 26 years old. and there's -- he was a minor, she wasn't. and we know that six months

later she gave birth to their first child. so -- >> it was suzanne. >> and the reasonable presumption is therefore they knew each other before they got married. >> and what was she doing at the time? >> a farmer's daughter. her father was dead. it gave her an unusual liberty, freedom, she didn't have brothers either who were watching over her. so she was an unusually independent woman with a small income. and obviously a will of her own. >> and what was he doing when he got married? >> well, we don't know exactly. part of that time of his life, about which the records are silent, there's lots of speculation including the ones i indulge in. what we know is that he was walking -- it wasn't very far, a mile and half or two miles from stratford where he -- his family lives, up to the little town of

shoddery and visiting in hathaway. i think he might have gone to shoddery because there's a complicated catholic set of traces that lead back to this very small town. and that can be connected i think, though we have to connect the dots to shakespeare. so he might have gone originally for something -- an errand for somebody, but in any case, he met and eventually married in hathaway. >> we're going to jump to the very end, and his will, as you say, had nothing in it for ann hathaway. >> nothing in it mentioned anything to her. to my wife of 34 year, zero. it doesn't mean she wouldn't have inherited something anyway. there were dour rights in the age and the people who wanted to sentimentalize this, well, there was no reason for shakespeare the lawyer to write anything in because everybody understood she

had the dour rights as his wife. it's very peculiar. most people make some gesture of -- to their wife. often very touching gestures of affection and love and there's nothing -- what there is is a strange delineation. that is to say, the lawyer came back and wrote something in between the lines on shakespeare's behalf and between the lines is written that he gives to his wife his second best. if that isn't an insult, i don't know what is. >> how many years did he live in london and did his family live in stratford? >> the almost whole of their marriage. in the first two years, he was around. at least we know he was around to have two more kids. twins, and then i think shortly thereafter, he must have gone. we don't know the exact time, but he must have gone up to

london. and then he stayed there as far as we can tell right through -- virtually his career, until he returned again in his late 40's. he returned to stratford, to the wife, to the two surviving children back in stratford. but it was basically his whole professional life and then in effect his whole married life he spent apart of his wife. >> you say that his son hamlet died when he was 11, one of the twins. what was the death caused by? >> we don't know. they didn't keep death records that specified this. we just have a death record that says he died at age 11. could have been any number of illnesses. the actuarial chances of making it through were fairly modest. the twin's sister, judith, lived a good, long life by the

standards of the age. i mean, look in your life or my life, probably if we actually think back, there's something that would have been likely to have taken us off if they hadn't invented penicillin or hadn't done this or that. or we could have got strep throat and recovered from it although, who knows. it could have been anything that took him away. >> what impact did the death have on shakespeare? >> some people say no impact. that he just went on with his work because we know that in the years after the writing of -- i mean, after the death of hamlet, shakespeare -- his father went on the write plays like "as you like it", light hearted, happy play, with lots of laughter and joy, happy marriages. but i don't believe it. i don't believe it not for sentimental reasons, but because first of all, in addition to writing those play, he also

wrote king john for example which has excruciating, beautiful and painalful lines about the death of a son, the death of a child. he also in 1601, so five years afterwards, he wrote a play that basically bore the same name as his dead son. they're used interchangeably in the time. and i think there are many m finger -- there are many, many fingerprints of the dead son and of shakespeare grappling with the death of his son in the writing. >> what was "hamlet" about? >> the play "hamlet"? he tended to use what was given to him, what he could find in his voracious reading what he could pick up and steal from somebody else. so the play he inherited was a revenge story about a son taking

vengeance for the murder of his father. but shakespeare freighted that story with the extraordinary material about mourning and grief and loss and what your relationship is with dead people whether they can speak to you any longer, whether they live in some other place or simply have been erased forever. and that weight, that extraordinary weight i think can be traced back to the experience of this loss. >> of the 38 play, which one in your opinion is the most important? if there such a thing. >> i think "hamlet" is a watershed play. hard to decide among the playwrights who had so many astonishing achievement, careers so full of recreating themselves. but i think hamlet does represent the pivot in shakespeare's life. if i think if he died before

writing "hamlet" we'd still think highly of him. he wrote "romeo and julie yet" and other magnificent works, but we wouldn't have guessed he had in him what came out after writing "hamlet." i don't think we could have predicted that it would be "macbeth", cleopatra. king lear. the astonishing outpouring of genius. tragic genius. tragic comedy. i think that "hamlet" is the pivot point. there's a kind of volcanic eruntion of language in hamlet, though we had already written about 20 or so plays, there are suddenly 600 words not only that he had never used before, but that had never been used before in any printed text that

survived from the english language that is astonishing. something erupting from him. and then -- >> did he invent the language? >> he did largely invent the language. i mean, he invented it -- he's very cunning at telling you what the words actually mean. when lady macbeth says that blood on her hands -- she's imagining her hands is going to make -- the next line is making the green one red. that is to say it means making something red, but shakespeare if he's introducing a very fancy 50 cent word will usually will give you a five cent explanation afterwards so you're not completely lost in the plays. i couldn't off the top of my head recite to you the words that he use, but many are words that we use like unpolluted, let's say in the -- for the first time in hamlet. people might have known polluted but wouldn't have used unpolluted and he often plays with language that way. and then there's something else going nonhamlet that fascinates

me, which i think shakespeare does here as far as i can tell for the first time. he had been very good at giving motivation to his character. if you think back at richard iii for example, quite energetic, a wonderful tragedy -- a tragedy had been written a decade roughly before he wrote "hamlet" he gives you a character that tells you so much why he's acting this way. i'm acting this way, i'm this miserable villain, i can't get any women. dogs bark at me in the street. it gives you 58 reasons that he's a miserable wretch that he is. when you get to "hamlet" shakespeare had a good motivational structure to tell you what was going on. from the older, medieval, from the renaissance adaptation, that

source said look, king brother killed him, openly. king's brother was not named claudia. and it's a scandinavian world in which you're expected to avenge a murder like that. so naturally if the the old king had a son, which is named hamlet he'd be expected to grow up to take revenge against the uncle. the uncle is no fool, it stands to reason he'd want to kill hamlet as well as killing the father. if he wants to protect his life. so in the original story, hamlet has a problem. just a -- basically he's little kid. a minor. he has to live long enough to be able to exact revenge for his father against this miserable, murderous uncle. everyone knows what this is about. so what little hamlet does is

start drooling and acting strangely and behaving like a lunatic and people laugh at him in a coarse way. people felt comfortable laughing at idiots in those days, and the result is they let him live because he's kind of a trophy 06 -- of in the danish court and he lives long enough in order to grow up to be -- it's basically the lion king -- version of the lion king story. he grows up to be -- to go back and take revenge, kill off his miserable uncle and exact revenge and become in line for prince. shakespeare takes the story, makes perfect sense as to why the original story of why hamlet has to behave like this. he takes that story, he has instead the murder as a secret, and no one knows, they think it's a serpent that's killed the old king while he's sleeping in his garden.

they don't know that the brother has poisoned him. the only one who knows is hamlet who knows because a ghost has told him, the ghost of his father. so hamlet is alone in the kingdom knowing besides the murder himself, the secret. then hamlet pretends he's mad. it makes no sense. it made great sense in the original version. it now makes no sense. and instead of ruining the play which you would think it might because the whole play is constructed now around something that is crazy, it actually makes the play the greatest thing that shakespeare had written up to that point. the most deepest and most motivationally maddening, the thing that you can't completely -- i mean he's a bone stuck in the throat of western civilization. he tries to spit it out, it's everywhere, it's in freud and marx. the great haunting in our life and it has to do -- it's not only this, but it has to do with this extraordinary move of

cutting out the motivation and the throwing away. then he did this again and again. many years a afterward, he discovered he could do this. if you look at the many great plays that followed at king lear at othello, you find he does the same thing. >> born in 1564, died in 1616, what year would he have written hamlet? >> he wrote hamlet in 1601. >> where was that in the context of the poems that he wrote and the plays that he had wrote? >> he hadn't written -- this iss if, the first -- he had written "romeo & juliet" the one major tragedy before. and then the outpouring of major tragedies follows. he had written 2/3 of what he would eventually write. he written most -- >> how do you teach this? i don't want to accuse you of

using techniques, but in a classroom, how do you approach your students and when do you see them getting interested? >> lots of different ways of teaching shakespeare. there are a million different ways of getting into these plays. i have my students often look at versions of the play, videos. i have my students have -- they act out thing, but mostly you look carefully. try to slow down because i am assuming that my students are perfectly capable of hard work, of reading the plays through an getting the gist of them. but the ability to sit and be patient and let it unlock itself because you can't do on stage. on stage or if you watch it in the video it's going along at its pace and that's fine. it goes along at its effect but i do with shakespeare that people who teach music do, slow it down. see how it's put together that's

one way of doing it. another thing i often do is to read other things written in the same period that are rather similar and see how -- what shakespeare is doing that the other people aren't doing or what changes to make to the sources, for example. have the students -- the sources have to look at the sources and see what happens when he takes blue tar -- plutar and it's close and sometimes daringly far away. something i have done recently that i haven't done before is to have students try to think about this as if they were going to try to write some of the plays. there are a couple of lost plays of shakespeare. at least one we know for sure that he wrote with a collaboration with a way wright named fletcher with whom he who wrote a couple of other plays, but it's lost. we have the students start playing with the sources to see if they can invent themes that have a shakespearean feel to

them. try to figure out what 10 20r or 50 things that shakespeare does. instead of rolling up one's eyes and saying this is incomprehendively great, we can figure out how it's done. >> how much of -- how many of his plays have politics in them? >> a lot of them have politics in them. depending on how broadly you define of the term, most have some politics in them. on the other hand, contemporary politics he had to be rather careful about, as did everyone. shakespeare was quite good at staying out of jail unlike many of the contemporaries. >> who censored his material? >> well, it was censored by someone called a master of the rebels, who worked -- you would have to present the script to the master to rebels and a few of the scripts, the comments survived. including one. if you published it, it went

through a different censor ran out of the bishop's office and he would read the text where it could be printed. so we have two different censor systems. >> did he have secret messages that helped to deliver for political reasons and what did he think of the monarchy? >> it's hard to tell, of course. if it was really secret and probably the case that there are parts of it, some secrets that we would have difficultly unlocking. i think that on the whole, but this is a subject about which there can be many, quite legitimately competing views, but i think on the whole he was being skeptical about the system. of charismatic monarchy in which he lived. but i think at the same time that he was fascinated by it, and willing to imagine it and think through it. the writer who wrote henry v about a charismatic warrior

king. it's a strange play because it's a celebration of the kind of regal heroism and shakespeare goes out of his way to depict this king, ordering the massacre of prisoners, voi lating -- violating the rules of law, behaving in a monstrous way. it's -- i think there's strong internal evidence that shakespeare is not approving of this behavior, that he's actually interested in the ways in which certain kind of charismatic authority is often intertwined with something that he might call primal behavior. >> in the earlier bunch of clips that we showed from earlier "booknotes" maureen dowd was there and she talked of studying shakespeare and using a lot in her columns. she is talking about comparing

karl rove to yargo. you can explain after, but let's listen to what she was saying. >> yargo in shakespeare is a fellow -- is a fellow's top military aide who keeps whispering in his ear saying that othello's wife has been unfaithful when she hasn't, because it serves his own purposes and she makes othello crazy and ends up killing his wife. >> why karl rove? >> well, karl rove is kind of -- they call it bush's brain, although i don't think that's fair. i think bush is bright, he's just a -- he's more malleable than his father because he hasn't studied up on foreign policy as much as his dad. karl rove i think he -- he was the one they found his computer disks or whatever and found out he intended -- he thought he could win majorities in congress by pushing the war. and so in the beginning of the

book, karl rove is featured as someone who wants to use war for political purposes. >> what do you think of the way she used shakespeare? >> she's using yargo as a figure for a kind of cold, reptilian evil. can be used in that way. a slightly strange analogy because you have to believe that karl rove is trying to destroy george w. bush which is what yargo is trying to do to othello. i think she wants to maybe -- we what we try to do to carve off a certain piece of the character, that's the most hateful character that shakespeare imagined, i think. and attribute that to the manipulative, dark power behind -- >> what do you think of using -- she's not the only one who does that, using shakespeare to define politics? >> i plead guilty to the charge. >> can you give us an example?

>> well, i confess i wrote something about the first debate the first presidential debate recently that in the "times" op-ed page that simply talked of the debate between if -- the debate is the right word for it, if desbat the right word for this current enterprise between an tony and brutus, to decide the course of the republic, which i tried to tease out a rough analogy, maureen dowd like between those two figures and the current figures. because the plays are cunning about human behavior, the plays reveal as one of your other clips said, actually a very good way of thinking of our human beings behave, one of the best representations that we have available to us. for the way in which human beings behave and so it's irresistible. >> another fellow you talk about

is christopher marlo, who was he? >> christopher marlo was shakespeare exact contemporary, born in 1564 as shakespeare was. he was from a provincial town and from a middle-class family, not an aristocratic family. a shoe maker's father, rather than a glove maker's father like shakespeare. they're like twins. but christopher marlo went to cambridge university, made it to the university and made it to london before shakespeare made it to london. so that when shakespeare arrived in london he would have been -- he would have encountered lots of people in a rather wild london theater world. but the most brilliant was christopher marlo, the most adventurous, the most imaginiv imaginive -- imaginetive and i think marlo made a profound impact on shakespeare.

shakespeare said he was so powerful that he was completely indifferent to his rivals. but thing is not true. i think that there's -- they're the fingerprints of christopher marlo's all over shakespeare's work and clear evidence of shakespeare brooding about marlo thinking about him as a rival, as a model and also as a fate, a destiny that he doesn't want for himself. >> do i remember correctly that paris and nepals were the only towns bigger than london and london is about 200,000? >> yeah. a huge city by european standards, london. >> back in the 1500? >> yeah. as you say, only three cities like this in europe. i don't know whether istanbul what the size was at that point. but these are remarkable cities and london was unique certainly in the british isles. >> i don't know if there's a way to do this, but shakespeare in

those times, if you moved to today, how big a name would he be? can you compare him with anybody today? you suggest he was quite an entrepreneur, he owned theaters, did he make a lot of money? >> he did, he made a lot of money. he was quite celebrated in his time. it's hard to sort of pick out a single figure now who would be comparable because shakespeare dominated his industry, if that's the way to put it n a way that no one i think dominates writing now. let's say i sometimes thought because i admire the person, and i love him as a human being, that healey the poet has something of what i encountered and i think he has exuberant, linguistic generosity that's recognized as admirable by a very, very wide swath of people, but i'm speaking of an irish

poet, but not of an american. as you walk around dublin, you see everyone sort of smiles at him and knows who he is and looks at him. i mean, waves to him. i think shakespeare had something of that celebrity in his own time. of course, of course, that didn't mean anyone sat down to write his biography. they didn't. >> we think of him as quite intellectual and that it was an intellectual experience. you say it was entertainment in those day, 1,500 to 2,000 people there. how much did they pay to get into the plays? >> cheap seats if you go to the outdoor theater, the globe, for example, you paid a penny to get in the door. and went into a box and -- a box office. and the -- if you wanted -- that just got you into the theater and a place where you could stand. as you know, it rains from time to time in england and the weather is often miserable. also it can be even sunny in

england. so if you wanted to get into a sheltered place, you had to pay another penny to get into one of the out of the standing area and on to a -- into a covered gallery. if you wanted a cushion, that would cost you another penny. so -- that was in the public theaters. >> can you relate that form of entertainment then to something we do now? would it relate to broadway or relate to a concert or how would you -- >> probably -- well, i don't know a comparable system in -- although, we have changed the rules in a way. now our rule is the more you pay the closer you get to the stage. in those days, the more you paid the further back in effect you were under one of the canapes. i think the experience would probably be closer to a concert -- rock concert or maybe a football game. than it would have been to decorous entertainment that we of as theater. there's lots of evidence that prostitutes who work the theaters and people were selling

oranges and other things to munch on, drinks at the theater. i mean, it was a much rougher by our standards much rougher world. >> what was the first thing he ever wrote? >> no one knows for sure. the dates of these things aren't so clear. if you really want to know the first thing that i think we have a trace of that he wrote, i think there's a little jingle that he wrote to sell gloves in his father's workshop. a jingle that someone named alexander aspinwall bought some gloves i think at the shakespeare family glove shop. people kept the record, it says the will -- the gift is small, the will is all, alexander aspinwall. he gave it to the woman he was courting. the person who wrote that in the 17th century said posing on a pair of glove, written by mr. shakespeare. so i think shakespeare was probably a teenager and wrote

that totally undistinguished little poem, a jingle to go with the gloves. but the first serious -- there's lots of leeway to argue about this, but probably to a gentleman in verona. >> what year? >> these this is difficult to say. maybe the late 1580's. could have one of the henry vi plays. >> so he would have been in his late 30's? >> oh, no. >> no, 20's, late 20's. >> yeah. >> the -- you say the first 17 sonnets and you say he wrote 154 sonnets. >> yes. >> first 17 were written for the earl of southampton? >> well, that's what i say. but we don't -- we don't know for sure and we don't know for sure because they're rather canny. these poems. >> canny -- >> not identifying exactly whom they're being written for or identifying exactly what the social situation is in which

they're being written that's the game sonnets played in this field. sonnets are curtained rooms and they're more and more diaphanous curtains around them. you think you see someone doing something, but you can't be sure who it is or what they're doing. shakespeare was a genius at constructing those little boxes within boxes. >> did he was a personal relationship with -- >> he did. that we do know. almost the only documents of the kind that we have are the two epistles that he wrote for the two narrative poems, the long, marvelous mythological poem. and the other one -- both are dedicated in extravagant terms, particularly the one in loving terms in eros, unusually intimate language for a poet of no particular social standing to

write to an earl who is absolutely at the highest point of a social hierarchy. >> you talk about christopher marlo and william shakespeare writing a play about jews. and then you also tie that into the fact that the spanish kicked jews out of their country and there were to jews in great britain back in his time. explain all that and what was -- why? >> the english had performed their ethnic cleansing before any other country in europe. 1290 i think it was that they expelled the jews of england for reasons that are not clear. we can reconstruct the usual anti-semitic story. the -- so that when shakespeare was writing, there were no jews, legally no jewish community in england. there might have been a few people who belonged to morano communities, secret jews, but we don't have a really clear

record. there were some rumors of this kind. there were some people who were from converso family, families that had been jewish a generation or more before, but had converted. they had converted to catholicism under pressure of the persecutions, first in spain and then in portugal. one of those people from a family that had been jewish a generation or more before was the queen's physician named lopez. and he fell into trouble in the 1590's, accused of having accepted a very large bribe from the king of spain. to do some skull dugry and it was charged, the skull duggerry was poisoning the queen. some think there was evidence or for it and others who didn't.

there are those who in the court who had access to the queen was almost certainly on the take. that's the way that the system worked. the closer you were to the person in power the more money you could make. i know this doesn't happen any longer, but in those days it happened. >> after two plays -- >> so what happened was that christopher marlo had written a very brilliant play called "the jew of malta" brilliant and reckless, that was anti-semitic, anti-christian, anti-muslim, you name it, it was anti. a very, very reckless play and it was successful. and it was revived on numerous occasions and one time it was almost certainly revived at the time that the charges came against this man, lopez. because at the treason trial for lopez said not only are you an agent on of the jesuit, but you're a jew and you are worse than judas and so on.

lopez said he was a good christian and when lopez was taken out to be executed, the queen protected him for a while and then finally withdrew protection. the executions were unspeakably horrible during this period but were also major public events. and he said from the scaffold in his speech when he was bidding phair well to the world he said the charges against him were not true and that he loved the queen as much as he loved jesus christ. the crowd that was at the foot of the scaffold burst into laughter. now, why did they burst into laughter? they burst into laughter because they thought that he was lying, but specifically, they thought he was making a joke. and where they had learned that joke was from christopher marlo. because marlo's jewish anti-hero who poisons people, a doctor who poisons people, he's always

making jokes of this kind. i love you with a burning zeal, enough to burn your house down, he says. as an aside. soar someone says how much is it going to cost you? oh, just your life, he says. planning to kill someone. that kind of joker. so i love you as much as i love jesus christ is a marlo joke and i think shakespeare was in the crowd watching this execution. i think he heard that laughter, and i think he had two different kinds of responses to the laughter that abraded together in a play that he wrote that was in effect a response to the jew of malta and it was the merchant of venice. the two responses are on the one hand, this is man who makes his profession making people laugh. he's interested in crowd laughter and excited by the mass response. there's lots of laughter in the merchant of venice. people are always talking about laughing. when will we laugh again, how can i make you laugh?

at the same time, i think he was made tremendously uncomfortable by the laughter at that execution, and i think that that discomfort is eloquently registered in the merchant of venice where every time you want to laughlaughter turns to a kind of gagging in your throat. this is a very, very complex comedy, performed. >> he died in 1616 of what? >> we don't know. we have a record that says he drank a lot, thought he was getting married, drank a lot, more than he should have. but not likely a father drinks too much at his daughter's wedding is going to die, so we don't know. >> if i heard right this morning you have been nominated for the national book award today. >> i have. >> the day we are taping this. is that a surprise? >> complete surprise. >> have you ever had this before? >> are you kidding? no. i'm delighted. >> what does it mean to an

author? >> i wanted very much in this book to figure out a way of telling an audience other than -- the audience i usually write for, which i am happy about, the audience that read academic books, of telling them about this astonishing life, telling what in the 40 years of thinking about shakespeare, i have learned about this human being, of crossing a line, from the world which i am happily paddling around most of my life, to a much larger pool, maybe something bigger than the pool, and that's what this means to me that this book has reached the audience that i dreamt that it might reach. >> how shakespeare became shakespeare, our guest, stephen

on your screen in the center of the university of texas at austin campus and booktv has been on location here at the university of texas conducting interviews with some of their professors who are also authors. every sunday during the month of november we will be bringing you those interviews at 1:00 p.m. eastern time as part of our university series. ..